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It’s hard to predict much about 10 years out, let alone 1000. But we keep expecting languages like COBOL and MUMPS to die, and they keep living on. I think th

It’s hard to predict much about 10 years out, let alone 1000. But we keep expecting languages like COBOL and MUMPS to die, and they keep living on. I think there’s a almost 100% chance that 1000 years from now, when all that’s left of human civilization is a bunch of bots trading hustle culture spam and culture war arguments on a zombie internet, that the whole thing will still run on some mission critical code written in C. Buggy, unsafe, but mission critical and hard to replace. And of course there will be heated bot arguments about how it should all be scrapped and rewritten in Rust++.

Aeolos 3y ago
If AI maintains a decent rate of advancement, it will eventually become possible to just ask an AI to... rewrite it in a different language. You can already give GPT a decent-sized chunk of C code and ask it to rewrite it in, say, Rust, and it works with some rate of success. For the last 50 years, this was impossible to do in a generic way. In the last 6 months, we managed to move the needle from impossible to possible. Give it another 12000 months, and what are the chances this would not move towards "trivial"?
- moregrist 3y ago
  Sure. But that's not what keeps systems written in COBOL or MUMPS. It's not what's kept the US air traffic control system running on 1970s-era hardware and software until very recently. Humans are perfectly capable of rewriting these systems. AI will be, as well. The problem with changing a mission-critical system is risk, and cost. Maybe omniscient AIs in 3023 won't have this issue, but my ghost will be entirely unsurprised if there are still mission critical systems written in C laying around because whatever benefits are rewrite would give are dwarfed by the risk, perceived or real, of what happens if the rewrite isn't 100% perfect or doesn't 100% match the current system.

Aeolos 3y ago

If AI maintains a decent rate of advancement, it will eventually become possible to just ask an AI to... rewrite it in a different language. You can already give GPT a decent-sized chunk of C code and ask it to rewrite it in, say, Rust, and it works with some rate of success. For the last 50 years, this was impossible to do in a generic way. In the last 6 months, we managed to move the needle from impossible to possible. Give it another 12000 months, and what are the chances this would not move towards "trivial"?

moregrist 3y ago
Sure. But that's not what keeps systems written in COBOL or MUMPS. It's not what's kept the US air traffic control system running on 1970s-era hardware and software until very recently. Humans are perfectly capable of rewriting these systems. AI will be, as well. The problem with changing a mission-critical system is risk, and cost. Maybe omniscient AIs in 3023 won't have this issue, but my ghost will be entirely unsurprised if there are still mission critical systems written in C laying around because whatever benefits are rewrite would give are dwarfed by the risk, perceived or real, of what happens if the rewrite isn't 100% perfect or doesn't 100% match the current system.